by Mike Gray

On Pajamas Media, Annie Gottlieb offers a critique of Marilynne Robinson’s collection of philosophical essays, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. Gottlieb asserts “… if a polemicist is a street fighter, in your face with a flurry of fists, Robinson is a ninja, around behind you cutting your airway—at least if you’re Pinker, Dennett, or Dawkins — before you’re aware that anyone else is in the room.  Her evident training in both the history of ideas and formal logic makes it easy for her to get the drop on these proudly ahistorical thinkers, who feed on ad hominem frontal assaults from counter-polemicists but can’t withstand the exposure of their own ideological antecedents, false assumptions, and self-contradictions.  Let’s hope some of Robinson’s supply-side intellect trickles down, because otherwise the culture at large might never know how deftly the reductionist view of a material universe ruled by blind chance, and a humanity driven by selfish genes, has been eviscerated. Robinson doesn’t prove that those two key dogmas of what she scathingly calls ‘parascience’ are wrong.  Rather, she shows that the arguments for them (when they are argued for at all, rather than merely assumed) are hopelessly shoddy, and that the smugness with which the final authority of ‘science’ is claimed for them is unwarranted.  She traces their ‘Now everything can be explained!’ triumphalism straight to the Victorian era, with its confidence — comical in the light of what science itself was soon to discover — ‘that science has given us knowledge sufficient to allow us to answer certain essential questions about the nature of reality, if only by dismissing them’ . . . .”

Absence of Mind, then, is apparently yet one more shot across the bow of scientism; if you’re a proponent of the scientistic viewpoint, you’ll probably dismiss it as either largely or wholly irrelevant.

One of the reviewers on Amazon.com, David L. Cook, places Robinson’s book in the larger cultural context:

It could be argued that like the American constitution, Culture relies for its checks and balances on three branches: science, the humanities, and religion. Unbalanced, religion falters into inquisitions and holy wars; science, into eugenics and bell curves; the humanities, into übermenchen and madmen. As Aristotle’s virtues rested in moderation, as Buddhism clings to the middle way, so must Culture find and maintain its equilibrium. At present, however, this equilibrium is disturbed. While hard science transforms matter into miracles, soft science maligns philosophy and religion, transforming the miracle of mind into matter if not dust, banishing the supernatural while highlighting the unnatural—the twentieth century having witnessed the ultimate flourishing of unnatural death to date.

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self by Pulitzer prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson provides a thoughtful case helping to restore cultural balance. She coins [the term] parascience to describe the theories of “self-declared rationalists” spreading the gospel of “objectivity” to reduce people into objects. The reasoning of her polemic is acute as she vivisects arguments to sweep aside the cultural wonders of consciousness and the human mind. She ridicules “the assumption that humankind is itself fearful, irrational, deluded and self-deceived, excepting, of course these missionaries of enlightenment [the parascientists themselves].” Always brilliant, Robinson is at times ironic, at times laugh-aloud funny. Her wit, intelligence and incisiveness seriously contest the notion that those disguising themselves in the wool of science have any monopoly on reason, logic or truth. At its best, her prose captures the consciousness of self and what it means to be human.

Absence of Mind is a four chapter defense of the human mind: “On Human Nature,” exposes and criticizes modernity’s theme that the mind, beguiled by evolutionary forces and a paucity of perception, cannot be trusted. ” The Strange History of Altruism,” questions the tendency to rationalize and spirit away human compassion on the wings of insect models. “The Freudian Self,” places Freud’s sexually-beleaguered unconscious mind (again, a mind discrediting human thought) in the social context of the hysteria and denial engendered by anti-Semitic, pre-holocaust Europe. Finally “Thinking Again” argues for the primacy of the “history of human thought” and its “ancient instinct” to ask the “greatest questions,” a glory that cannot be reduced or constrained by the inadequate, parochial theories of parascience, a term that deserves to find its way into the common vocabulary of our culture, separating the dregs of ideology from the fine wine of science.

Absence of Mind is available on Amazon.com. Annie Gottlieb’s review is here.